Sunday, May 15, 2016

Shout It Out Loud: The Story of Kiss’s Destroyer and the Making of an American Icon

James Campion

Backbeat Books, 400 pages

Released on March
15, 1976, Destroyer
catapulted Kiss from underground sensation to constant media presence. The
recording of Destroyer was as
colorful and chaotic as the album itself, and every nuance is covered in James
Campion’s book Shout It Out Loud: The Story of Kiss’s Destroyer and the
Making of an American Icon.

Before Destroyer,
Kiss attracted mostly male fans with songs about sex, sex, whores and more sex.
(OK, so not that different from what
they’d do later on.) With the single “Beth”, the band catapulted into
mainstream consciousness and have remained there for over 40 years.When Kiss
Alive was released in 1975, it became an unexpected hit, and the recording
of the next studio album took on new importance.

The
book covers the band or “The Act’s” (Campion’s term) pre-history and their
first three albums for legendary Casablanca Records. Despite their outrageous
appearance and a music press that lapped it up, mainstream success eluded
them.You’d think with all
the facepaint, leather and platform boots they’d storm through mid-70s America
immediately, but the road wasn’t that easy.

Bob Ezrin, the young Canadian producer who helmed Alice
Cooper’s Welcome to My Nightmare,
signed on to produce the band’s fourth studio album. Ezrin greeted the band
naked except for a bowtie (allegedly), but the recording sessions that followed
weren’t always quite as light-hearted. Ezrin schooled the band in music theory
and challenged them to expand their creative horizons. A stern taskmaster, he
even refused to procure Gene’s hookers for him.

Ezrin ran the sessions like a musical boot camp, taking the
demos and working with the band to improve them. Case in point - “Beth” started
out as a demo from Criss’ old band, Lips. Originally a song called “Beck” about
a nagging wife, Ezrin and the band reworked it into the ballad that saturated
the airwaves in 1976.

The song, originally paired as the B side of “Detroit
Rock City”,
took off when DJ Rosalie Trombly of Windsor-based, Detroit-aimed CKLW started
playing it, preferring it to “Detroit
Rock City”.
Listeners loved it so much Casablanca
made it the “A” side, and the ballad became “The Act’s” best-selling single
ever, reaching #7 on the Billboard charts.

The Destroyer sessions succeeded in turning the four
distinct personas – previously relayed by just costumes and make-up, and
breathed fire (excuse the expression) and life into them. The album - and
“Beth” were the starting point of the “How Can We Miss Them If They Won’t Go
Away?” Kiss empire. The songs weren’t just rowdy party anthems, under Ezrin’s
direction, they took on mythic proportions.

“Do You Love Me?” established Paul as the Starchild, the
group’s romantic lead. Ezrin and the band reworked the Stanley-penned “God of
Thunder”, into Gene’s theme song, giving his onstage demon persona the perfect soundtrack.
“Flaming Youth” and “Great Expectations” were positioned as youth anthems.

Drawing from Stanley’s
memory of a news story about a fan who died in a car crash somewhere in the
South, Ezrin sandwiched “Detroit Rock
City”, a raucous tribute to the Motor
City, with an audio melodrama, complete
with news radio snippet and car crash sound effects.

Campion devotes quite a bit of detective work attempting to
unearth the real story behind the tragedy that spawned “Detroit
Rock City”,
and the entire epilogue is devoted to this subject. The book consists of new interviews
and tales from Ezrin, Jay Messina, Corky Stasik, Kim Fowley, Bob Gruen, Ken
Kelly, (the artist who designed the iconic comic superhero cover),and lots of
archival interviews.

Shout It Out Loud: The Story of Kiss’s Destroyer and the
Making of an American Icon may be way too involved for the causal fan. If
you’re looking for some quick gossip, or if the nuts and bolts of songwriting
and the analog recording process bores you, this book’s not for you. There are
the usual tales of Ace and Peter’s drinking and drugging, sex in the studio and
such, but Shout It Out Loud
concentrates on the writing and recording and subsequent promotion of Destroyer in minute detail.

Devoted Kissaholics, however, will appreciate the look into every
nook and cranny of the recording sessions, promotion and tour that accompanied Destroyer.